It is commonly recognized that the release of body fluids which may harbor bacteria, viruses, or other hazardous and toxic agents by patients being transported or rescued by emergency response personnel presents potentially serious dangers. Additionally, because all such spilled bodily fluids must be treated as potentially infectious, any contaminated equipment, including vehicles, must be cleaned prior to use on or with another patient in order to reduce or eliminate the risk of cross contamination or infection.
In some cases, the required cleaning can be both costly and burdensome due to the time when the equipment must be removed from use. For example, when the interior of an air rescue helicopter becomes contaminated with a large volume of a patient's bodily fluid, it must be removed from service and many parts of the interior cabin may need to be disassembled in order to gain access to and clean every crevice into which fluid may have seeped. This process is very costly and requires that a multi-million dollar rescue vehicle, for which there may be no available substitute, be taken out of service for several days.
Liquid impermeable and/or absorbent sheets have been described in the prior art and used for such purposes. One example is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,135,792 titled DISPOSABLE, SELF-ENVELOPING AND SELF-CONTAINING ON-DEMAND, SUPER ABSORBENT COMPOSITE, issued Aug. 4, 1992. Other proposed solutions are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,615,425 titled FITTED SHEET FOR USE AS A DISPOSABLE STRETCHER/GURNEY LINEN, issued Apr. 1, 1997 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,453,492 titled SHEET FOR STRETCHER/GURNEY, issued Sep. 24, 2002.
Large sheets or drapes can be very cumbersome to use, difficult to position and keep in place on a stretcher or gurney, and equally difficult to open from a folded condition by a single person. The present invention addresses each of these concerns.